Have you scientific men _no_ imagination? Have you no mercy? We cannot have our world trampled under a growing herd of such monsters and monstrous growths as your Food has made. We cannot and we cannot! I ask you, Sir, what can it be but war? And remember--this that has happened is only a beginning! _This_ was a skirmish. A mere affair of police.
Believe me, a mere affair of police. Do not be cheated by perspective, by the immediate bigness of these newer things. Behind us is the nation--is humanity. Behind the thousands who have died there are millions. Were it not for the fear of bloodshed, Sir, behind our first attacks there would be forming other attacks, even now. Whether we can kill this Food or not, most a.s.suredly we can kill your sons! You reckon too much on the things of yesterday, on the happenings of a mere score of years, on one battle. You have no sense of the slow course of history. I offer this convention for the sake of lives, not because it can change the inevitable end. If you think that your poor two dozen of Giants can resist all the forces of our people and of all the alien peoples who will come to our aid; if you think you can change Humanity at a blow, in a single generation, and alter the nature and stature of Man--"
He flung out an arm. "Go to them now, Sir. I see them, for all the evil they have done, crouching among their wounded--"
He stopped, as though he had glanced at Redwood"s son by chance.
There came a pause.
"Go to them," he said.
"That is what I want to do."
"Then go now...."
He turned and pressed the b.u.t.ton of a bell; without, in immediate response, came a sound of opening doors and hastening feet.
The talk was at an end. The display was over. Abruptly Caterham seemed to contract, to shrivel up into a yellow-faced, f.a.gged-out, middle-sized, middle-aged man. He stepped forward, as if he were stepping out of a picture, and with a complete a.s.sumption of that friendliness that lies behind all the public conflicts of our race, he held out his hand to Redwood.
As if it were a matter of course, Redwood shook hands with him for the second time.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH.
THE GIANT LEAGUER.
I.
Presently Redwood found himself in a train going south over the Thames.
He had a brief vision of the river shining under its lights, and of the smoke still going up from the place where the sh.e.l.l had fallen on the north bank, and where a vast mult.i.tude of men had been organised to burn the Herakleophorbia out of the ground. The southern bank was dark, for some reason even the streets were not lit, all that was clearly visible was the outlines of the tall alarm-towers and the dark bulks of flats and schools, and after a minute of peering scrutiny he turned his back on the window and sank into thought. There was nothing more to see or do until he saw the Sons....
He was fatigued by the stresses of the last two days; it seemed to him that his emotions must needs be exhausted, but he had fortified himself with strong coffee before starting, and his thoughts ran thin and clear.
His mind touched many things. He reviewed again, but now in the enlightenment of accomplished events, the manner in which the Food had entered and unfolded itself in the world.
"Bensington thought it might be an excellent food for infants," he whispered to himself, with a faint smile. Then there came into his mind as vivid as if they were still unsettled his own horrible doubts after he had committed himself by giving it to his own son. From that, with a steady unfaltering expansion, in spite of every effort of men to help and hinder, the Food had spread through the whole world of man. And now?
"Even if they kill them all," Redwood whispered, "the thing is done."
The secret of its making was known far and wide. That had been his own work. Plants, animals, a mult.i.tude of distressful growing children would conspire irresistibly to force the world to revert again to the Food, whatever happened in the present struggle. "The thing is done," he said, with his mind swinging round beyond all his controlling to rest upon the present fate of the Children and his son. Would he find them exhausted by the efforts of the battle, wounded, starving, on the verge of defeat, or would he find them still stout and hopeful, ready for the still grimmer conflict of the morrow? His son was wounded! But he had sent a message!
His mind came back to his interview with Caterham.
He was roused from his thoughts by the stopping of his train in Chislehurst station. He recognised the place by the huge rat alarm-tower that crested Camden Hill, and the row of blossoming giant hemlocks that lined the road....
Caterham"s private secretary came to him from the other carriage and told him that half a mile farther the line had been wrecked, and that the rest of the journey was to be made in a motor car. Redwood descended upon a platform lit only by a hand lantern and swept by the cool night breeze. The quiet of that derelict, wood-set, weed-embedded suburb--for all the inhabitants had taken refuge in London at the outbreak of yesterday"s conflict--became instantly impressive. His conductor took him down the steps to where a motor car was waiting with blazing lights--the only lights to be seen--handed him over to the care of the driver and bade him farewell.
"You will do your best for us," he said, with an imitation of his master"s manner, as he held Redwood"s hand.
So soon as Redwood could be wrapped about they started out into the night. At one moment they stood still, and then the motor car was rushing softly and swiftly down the station incline. They turned one corner and another, followed the windings of a lane of villas, and then before them stretched the road. The motor droned up to its topmost speed, and the black night swept past them. Everything was very dark under the starlight, and the whole world crouched mysteriously and was gone without a sound. Not a breath stirred the flying things by the wayside; the deserted, pallid white villas on either hand, with their black unlit windows, reminded him of a noiseless procession of skulls.
The driver beside him was a silent man, or stricken into silence by the conditions of his journey. He answered Redwood"s brief questions in monosyllables, and gruffly. Athwart the southern sky the beams of searchlights waved noiseless pa.s.ses; the sole strange evidences of life they seemed in all that derelict world about the hurrying machine.
The road was presently bordered on either side by gigantic blackthorn shoots that made it very dark, and by tail gra.s.s and big campions, huge giant dead-nettles as high as trees, flickering past darkly in silhouette overhead. Beyond Keston they came to a rising hill, and the driver went slow. At the crest he stopped. The engine throbbed and became still. "There," he said, and his big gloved finger pointed, a black misshapen thing before Redwood"s eyes.
Far away as it seemed, the great embankment, crested by the blaze from which the searchlights sprang, rose up against the sky. Those beams went and came among the clouds and the hilly land about them as if they traced mysterious incantations.
"I don"t know," said the driver at last, and it was clear he was afraid to go on.
Presently a searchlight swept down the sky to them, stopped as it were with a start, scrutinised them, a blinding stare confused rather than mitigated by an intervening monstrous weed stem or so. They sat with their gloves held over their eyes, trying to look under them and meet that light.
"Go on," said Redwood after a while.
The driver still had his doubts; he tried to express them, and died down to "I don"t know" again.
At last he ventured on. "Here goes," he said, and roused his machinery to motion again, followed intently by that great white eye.
To Redwood it seemed for a long time they were no longer on earth, but in a state of palpitating hurry through a luminous cloud. Teuf, teuf, teuf, teuf, went the machine, and ever and again--obeying I know not what nervous impulse--the driver sounded his horn.
They pa.s.sed into the welcome darkness of a high-fenced lane, and down into a hollow and past some houses into that blinding stare again. Then for a s.p.a.ce the road ran naked across a down, and they seemed to hang throbbing in immensity. Once more giant weeds rose about them and whirled past. Then quite abruptly close upon them loomed the figure of a giant, shining brightly where the searchlight caught him below, and black against the sky above. "Hullo there!" he cried, and "stop! There"s no more road beyond ... Is that Father Redwood?"
Redwood stood up and gave a vague shout by way of answer, and then Cossar was in the road beside him, gripping both hands with both of his and pulling him out of the car.
"What of my son?" asked Redwood.
"He"s all right," said Cossar. "They"ve hurt nothing serious in _him_."
"And your lads?"
"Well. All of them, well. But we"ve had to make a fight for it."
The Giant was saying something to the motor driver. Redwood stood aside as the machine wheeled round, and then suddenly Cossar vanished, everything vanished, and he was in absolute darkness for a s.p.a.ce. The glare was following the motor back to the crest of the Keston hill. He watched the little conveyance receding in that white halo. It had a curious effect, as though it was not moving at all and the halo was. A group of war-blasted Giant elders flashed into gaunt scarred gesticulations and were swallowed again by the night ... Redwood turned to Cossar"s dim outline again and clasped his hand. "I have been shut up and kept in ignorance," he said, "for two whole days."
"We fired the Food at them," said Cossar. "Obviously! Thirty shots. Eh!"
"I come from Caterham."
"I know you do." He laughed with a note of bitterness. "I suppose he"s wiping it up."
II.
"Where is my son?" said Redwood.
"He is all right. The Giants are waiting for your message."
"Yes, but my son--..."
He pa.s.sed with Cossar down a long slanting tunnel that was lit red for a moment and then became dark again, and came out presently into the great pit of shelter the Giants had made.